DDR Pictures/Movies

Every Saturday night I stop by the arcade to dance a few rounds. It's pretty tough waking up to go to church after staying out until 11:00, but I manage it. On this particular occasion, I brought my camera and took a few good pictures. It's kind of hard to take pictures since there wasn't a whole lot of light, but I didn't want to draw attention to myself by using the flash. This page only exists because I took a video of Sara (the one on the pad below), and she wanted me to send it to her. Since attaching it in an e-mail wasn't really feasible, I put them up here.

There were only three other DDR people there when I brought my camera.
Ed and Sara are on the pad while "Bob" takes a breather (foreground).

Movies of Sara

At first I wondered if she wanted me to post these for all to see, but if she doesn't mind dancing at the arcade in front of all the people, she probably wouldn't mind dancing in front of everyone on the Internet. I assume Sara spells her name without an 'h', but I don't know because the only place I've seen it spelled was the top five where you can only enter four letters.

BTW, if you want to keep these, you might want to save them on your computer. I can't guarantee I'll keep them around here forever.

Some fast double. 10 MB, no sound, part of it is sideways	Some other song with lots of jumping up and down. 10 MB, no sound	Some really fast song with lots of jumping up and down. 10 MB, no sound

Good DDR form

Lately I've been trying to figure out the proper DDR form. I think I've pretty much figured it out, and now I can illustrate my point with these pictures.

Normally whenever you do anything you're supposed to have "good posture" and stand up straight. In DDR this isn't quite true. When you slouch slightly you are able to use your stomach muscles to pull your torso down and lift your legs by inertia. While this makes you much faster, not everyone does this because not everyone needs the speed. Ed and a few others stand up straight because they have pretty much every song memorized and know what's coming. Sara and "Bob" slouch a little, and on some songs (the fast ones that I don't know), I look like a downhill skier.

Also, one of the more important things is to stay in the middle of the pad. This makes it so don't have to try to move your whole body to go from Up+Right to Down+Left. Sara and a few of the others move around and they seem to do pretty well like that, but it looks like they're expending more energy.

The hardest thing to do is to pick your feet up off the pad as little as possible. There isn't really anything so difficult about actually doing it; it's just that it's much harder to be accurate.

Here are two pictures of "Bob" demonstrating how one should do things. I don't know what Bob's real name is, but he has a Bob the Tomato sticker on his gamecard, and that's the only identification I know to use. He claims his sister gave him the sticker. Suuure.

You can see he doesn't stand up quite straight...	...and you may also notice he says in the center of the pad.
	Sara doesn't always stay in the middle of the pad, but she does bend over slightly. She's also extremely concentrated and stares into the screen with particular intentness. She uses her arms to counterbalance her head, and she also uses them to get her into the air when she needs to jump. I've pointed out most of the highlights in the picture for your convenience. ;-)

Until next week, everyone.

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